Wednesday, April 6, 2016

France: Jewish parents pulling children out of public schools to protect them from Muslim students (video)

The number of Jews enrolled in
France’s public school system has decreased significantly as parents
seek to protect their children from Muslim students, a French Jewish
security official told international channel VICE Newson Tuesday.

Robert Ejness, director general of
CRIF, French Jewry’s umbrella organization, said that Jewish parents are
“very worried and questioning the future of their children in this
country.”

Ejness explained:

This is an unstable
situation that we’ve not known in the past. In 1970, only 7,000 French
kids went to Jewish schools. Today, it’s 35,000 and 35,000 are going to
Christian schools…One of the issues is the integration of the Muslim
population… that has arrived in France in the last 20-30 years which has
not been integrated, which has refused also to be integrated in the
French system.

Despite the shock the nation felt following the January, 2015 Charlie Hebdo
attacks, Ejness said, he believes antisemitic attacks in France will
continue to rise. “The numbers for last year [were] very high — over 900
antisemitic acts — and we believe this year will not better,” he said.

While some Jewish parents have taken
steps to protect their children inside the country’s public school
system, others are leaving France completely, according to Paul
Fitoussi, headmaster of the Lucien De Hirsch School — the oldest Jewish
school in France and one of the largest in Europe. Fitoussi told VICE News that
over the course of the last year, 36 percent of families who had their
children enrolled in the school “left… to go to Israel.”